Eternal Recurrence
by staticsky
Summary: Over and over again. Over and over again. Living and reliving and reliving the same week and the few months following, then turning back the clock, spiraling backward in an endless, sickening loop. She asks the same question they are trying to answer... /is leave possible/


Over and over again. Over and over again.

Living and reliving and reliving the same week and the few months following, then turning back the clock, spiraling backward in an endless, sickening loop.

The curse bestowed upon her when she tuned into the ghosts' frequency, when she opened the portal, when she stepped through into the void – into their world.

Every time, once she turns the dial on her radio and seals her fate, Alex _remembers._ Remembers every last miserable trip through the time loop. As the years go by they blend together – every possible option, every possible outcome, every possible person.

Eternal recurrence, she'd said (many times) in Maggie Adler's house on that horrible, horrible night (nights). She hadn't fully understood what that _meant_ until she'd been through the loop five times and then more and more, the ghosts dragging her through and off to the wreck of the Kanaloa.

\\\eighty-five officers and twelve passengers\\\

Radio anomalies. Voices in her head that aren't in her head. Utter confusion. She tries to keep track somehow. Of the days. Of the weeks. Of the months. Of the years…centuries…millennia…

(Clarissa's eyes had glowed like that on loops one through three. Ren's on loop four. Clarissa's again on loop five. Seven. Fifteen. Twenty-five. Three hundred and ninety-nine. She had to count, had to keep track. Had to keep her sanity.)

Slowly she managed to establish a sense of déjà vu in whatever self of hers was traversing the loop. Something to try to guide herself safely through the portal and _out again._ To do what she'd failed to do. To escape.

Over and over again. Over and over again.

Living and reliving the same week and the few months following, then turning back the clock, spiraling backward in an endless, sickening loop.

\\\eighty-five\\\

\\\let us take clarissa jonas ren nona michael\\\

\\\leave is possible\\\

Alex understood. She asked the same question they are trying to answer.

/is leave possible/

Maybe it is. Maybe…that is her job, her reason for being in the void. Save everyone. Help the ghosts, or whatever they are, leave. Stop them from inflicting this madness on anyone else.

(Having purpose drives back the red of madness. Having purpose keeps her as grounded as a void-ghost can be.)

At first she can only send a simple messages, test messages. Songs hummed through the space-time cracks. Fragmented words.

The place she'd gotten through to wasn't marked with a pile of stones. It was the only place she could reach through, try to reach herself – her younger self? Older self? Past self? Future self?

Eons. Was it eons? There was always an Alex in the void, now. Every second gaining more memories, more details, more versions of the story, over and over again. Time was wound more tightly around Edwards Island, where the recurrence was a few months rather than the full life of the universe. Where the sinking of the Kanaloa had broken everything.

She finally learns the secret. The ghosts slip up. She's learned since her first tries to better broadcast through her point of contact, praying that some student, or maybe even some Alex, would stumble across it. Be lucky enough to flip through stations as they walked past. Build that pile of stones. Maybe understand the message.

Morse code. Speech (to the best of her ability, anyway). Alternating. A constant loop. The irony amused her at first, then became sickening.

 _/alex this is you/_

 _/need to speak with you/_

 _/say it is okay for me to leave with you/_

 _/please/_

 _/can prove this is you/_

 _/only way off the island/_

An Alex finally found the signal. Didn't trust it.

Over and over, Alexes began to hear her message.

Then. One happened by with Jonas and asked for the proof Alex had been waiting to provide.

Alex _recognized_ this Alex. It was the original Alex, somehow. Time had worn itself out, such an endless loop that they were back to the start.

The perfect Alex. Original Alex, as it were. The only one who might be able to save _everyone_ from this hell.

 _/you once hid a cup of orange juice in a cabinet in the kitchen/_

 _/when you were almost three years old/_

 _/to save it for later you said/_

 _/you drank it four months later and got sick/_

She watches as Original Alex goes pale, and her timeline changes. For the better.

"Um. Okay. That's something only I would know. Or my mom, I guess. But the story wouldn't get to Edwards Island unless it was…through me."

Original Jonas swallows, staring, equally as pale as Original Alex.

/good you believe me/

/okay let's get this show on the road/

She'd collected more and more words over the eons she'd spent in this void.

/i need to sort of possess you but not like clarissa/

Loop One was the only one she remembered for sure. Clarissa falling out the window. Clarissa sitting on the lamppost. Clarissa, with her eyes glowing, her body moving in humanly-impossible ways as the ghosts of the Kanaloa played their sick game.

/i'll sort of join up with you, leave you in there/

/may hurt at first but it's the only way/

/are you okay with that/

Slowly, Original Alex nods. Jonas squeezes her hand. Alex in the void remembers how Jonas truly became her brother on this horrible night.

If she escapes, if this Alex makes it out, if she fades into nothingness and leaves only the original Alex behind to live a life without the void…she'll give them that chance.

She wants, of course, to leave with Alex. She understands the ghosts of the Kanaloa. Their drive to escape. To leave the void and truly _live_ again.

But the Kanaloa ghosts have been here far longer than her. They were beyond…redemption, she supposed. Beyond escape. They could no longer live as they once did.

But Alex can. She's frayed a bit around the edges, the slightest bit of static creeping in, but she is not yet going red, not yet driven mad. Her purpose has been too singular, too powerful, for the anger and sadness and desperation to overcome her.

For her, _leave is possible._

/okay here we go/

/open up this triangle portal with your radio/

She provides the start, the single shape floating in midair above the step-siblings. Alex tunes the radio, carefully lining up the frequencies. Sound and time warp the air, warp space, warp finally into an exit for the void-ghost of Alex to travel through.

Original Alex shivers as Void-Alex joins her. There's pain – but part of Alex, the _only Alex_ now, welcomes it. Pain, and the wind on her face, and Jonas standing next to her, like he had been long, long ago.

(One of the ghosts, the one passively possessing Alex, hurls itself at her; Alex grips him by the arm and flings him out into the void. The last fragment of Void-Alex breathes a sigh of relief.)

"Um," she stammers, finding a true voice once again. "Hi, Jonas."

"Hi," he manages. "Are you – are you the radio Alex? Ghost Alex? Or, you know, whatever you call it. Or are you Alex-Alex?"

"B-both, I guess. Sort of. I'm the only Alex now." She smiles. It feels so good to smile. "Um. Okay. Escape time. Where are the others?"

Jonas leads Alex down the winding pathways until they meet up with Ren and Nona in Harden Tower. They all climb down together, Jonas quietly explaining what's happening to the other two.

"You all, have ghosts in you," Alex adds, her voice tense yet soft. "Fight them, if you can. Hold them back. I'll send them all back through at the same time – we won't miss any, then."

They all respond with variations on "I'll try."

Alex can sense where Clarissa is. She leads them all to her, lures her slowly across the island and through the bunker and into the cave.

As they stand before the first portal ever made on the island, the ghosts in them all cry out in anger, in terror, suddenly recognizing that it is the true Alex standing before them, the one they'd been trapped with for so long.

She turns the radio dial. A tone chimes through the cave, echoing off the walls. A bar of light, magnetic and glowing a pure, bright white, appears in the portal. She's using the code the ghosts had let slip. A WAL lock code, the one used to access the dock of the U.S.S. Kanaloa.

The others' eyes glow red, but it's different now. The ghosts are being pulled toward the portal, dragging the teens upward with them, almost like before, during those terrible moments of possession…but at the same time so, so different.

A second bar. They screech, but the screeches are drowned completely out by the lock tone. Neutralizing them. Driving the red, the madness, the darkness away. A code for peace. For quiet. For rest. For sending them on, on forever. Finally leaving the Kanaloa behind them.

The third lock tone chimes, and the red spirals out of everyone. They drop heavily to the ground as a whirling vortex of red is pulled through the cracks in the ethereal WAL lock and off into the void. The most broken part of Alex flies in with them – the static, the fraying, fades away.

She switches the radio off, and with a warping sound that echoes across the island, _the portals close_.

For the secret wasn't for a human to enter the portal, to cross the barrier to the other side and shut it from there.

The secret was for someone like her, a ghost of the void, to cross back over and shut the others in. It was the opposite of Maggie and Anna's formula. They'd been so close, so very close – and it had cost Anna everything.

But now there were no more ghosts. No more time loops. No more void Alex. No more. No more.

She collapses.

Eternities are still running together in Alex's mind. Her imagination warps and wavers at the edges, making her dreams hiss with static and glow red as she remembers the Kanaloa and – and –

Honestly, never thinking about it ever again would be preferable.

But she knows it's over, entirely over, for _sure_ , when she again feels herself lying on something far more substantial than the void, or the glowing-on-the-edges house where she's spoken with Michael more times than she can count. When she feels herself awaken there with _every_ memory of that night, of the months that followed.

It would drive an ordinary person insane. But Alex has been to the void and back. She's human, but she's also something more. Or different. Damaged but whole, patched at the edges, the goal she's fulfilled sewing up the holes. The pain, the terror, the loneliness, the desperation…they will always be there. But so will the joy she feels at long last.

She can hear the others milling about, some in the ferry cabin with her, some outside, their voices muffled.

"Guys?" she mumbles.

"Hey." She thinks it is Jonas who has spoken – it is, she confirms, as she opens her eyes just a bit.

"Um. Well. I think that's it."

She sits up, her stare vacant and distant, but growing more present every second. Now she can try to live. The others move to sit on the bench beside her.

Wind. Fresh air. Friends with her, after all this time. She's even beyond pleased to see Clarissa. The other girl is acting different toward her. Kinder. They must have told her what had happened, what Alex had done for her. Or maybe she'd been able to see everything as the Kanaloa ghosts moved her around the island.

Either way, she hesitantly takes the seat next to Alex and wraps an arm around her shoulders.

Jonas, on her other side, squeezes her hand. Ren and Nona crowd as close as possible. Slowly Alex feels less empty, less like the spirit of the void she was and more like the Alex she has wished to be all along.

"It's over," she whispers to no one in particular. "It's over."


End file.
